Baseball: The two homers that put Stanford in Super Regional came from unlikely sources

Halfway through the Stanford baseball season, freshman Tommy Edman was hitting under .200 as a part-time second baseman. He had one homer in his first 44 games.

Junior Wayne Taylor, who wanted to catch, was playing a lot in left field, but his average was dipping below .200 as well. He had one homer in his first 34 games.

Yet Edman and Taylor each slammed clutch home runs in victories over Indiana to move the Cardinal into this weekend’s NCAA Super Regional at Vanderbilt.

One again, the Cardinal (34-24) will be the underdog. The Commodores (47-18) swept them in the third weekend of the season and again have the home-field advantage.

“We’re trying to get our revenge on Vanderbilt,’’ Edman said. “I think that (Stanford) was a totally different team.’’

“We’re excited,’’ Taylor said. “We feel we have some unfinished business there. We weren’t playing our best baseball when we played them last time. Right now we’re pitching better; we’re definitely hitting better.’’

After hitting just 26 homers in 53 regular-season games, Stanford unloaded nine – all by different players – in the five-game Bloomington Regional.

None was more surprising than Edman’s walkoff two-run clout in Monday’s finale, turning a 4-3 deficit into a 5-4 win. It was the first left-handed homer of his life, although Edman, a natural righty, had switch-hit only during his freshman and senior years of high school in San Diego.

“I was shocked,’’ Stanford coach Mark Marquess said, and, after 38 years as the skipper, there isn’t much that surprises him.

Edman took over as the shortstop and leadoff man after Drew Jackson broke a finger against Cal on April 28. Edman went 10-for-24 in the regional, lifting his average to 258. Jackson has returned but can’t get his job back.

“Our team has been resilient all year,’’ Edman said. “We’ve had a bunch of walk-off wins, a bunch of come-from-behind victories.’’

Marquess didn’t make it easy on his team by booking traditional baseball powers Rice, Texas and Vanderbilt in the opening weeks. The Cardinal were 4-7 out of the gate.

“A lot of teams around the country use their preseason to build their confidence a little bit,’’ Edman said. “We took the total opposite approach, trying to play the best teams possible. I think that definitely benefited us later in the season. Nothing was a shock when we were facing really good teams.’’

According to Edman, Stanford’s fortunes in the regional turned around abruptly when Taylor hit a pinch-hit, three-run homer in against Indiana on Sunday. The opposite-field shot in the eighth inning turned a 6-4 deficit into a 7-6 lead, and the Cardinal went on to a 10-7 win, setting up Edman’s heroics the next day.

“That was awesome,’’ Edman said of Taylor’s fourth homer of the season. “There were only four outs left in the game at that point. It’s tough to come in cold off the bench, but it totally changed the momentum of the series.’’

Taylor was an all-state quarterback in football-crazy Texas, but he was also Texas baseball player of the year at Memorial High in Houston. He misses football, he said, but he knew he had a brighter future in baseball.

He turned down the Angels, who drafted him in the 14th round, to play at Stanford. After hitting just .151 in limited appearances as a freshman, he hit .270 as a sophomore and he has jacked his average to .240 this year.

His college career was “not where he wanted it to be because he was such a high-profile guy,’’ Marquess said.

Now Taylor, Edman and their teammates – the only Pac-12 team still standing – are just two wins away from going to the College World Series.